At the center of the furor is George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old
community watch man who has admitted to chasing Martin down and
shooting him twice. Zimmerman has not been arrested by local
authorities, on the grounds that he was acting in self-defense.

Not much is known about Zimmerman, who has been conspicuously
silent since the incident. He has alternatively been identified
as white and as Hispanic, a distinction that many pundits
apparently see as crucial to determining whether race was a
motivating factor in Martin's death. Neighbors of the Zimmerman
family
told the Associated Press that Zimmerman's father is
white and his mother is Peruvian. (Although it is not clear why
Zimmerman's Hispanic background should rule out racial motivation
in the slaying of a black teen.)

According to the AP, Zimmerman was a self-styled one-man
neighborhood watch, making nearly 50 calls to police in Sanford,
Fla., over the past 8 years. He took criminal justice classes at
a local community college and even considered a career in law
enforcement. In 2011, Zimmerman worked with police to form a
formal neighborhood watch group in his gated community, and acted
as the group's liaison to the Sanford PD.

A 47-page
document of Zimmerman's most recent 9-1-1 calls, posted
online by the city of Sanford today, paints a portrait of a man
who was obsessed with law-and-order. Most of the calls relate to
suburban mundanities (kids jumping fences, suspicious cars), but
he appears to have been particularly concerned about the behavior
of young black males.

Mother Jones' Adam Weinstein draws our attention to these calls:

In August 2011, he called to report a black male in a tank
top and shorts acting suspicious near the development's back
entrance. "[Complainant] believes [subject] is involved in recent
S-21s"—break-ins—"in the neighborhood," the call log states. The
suspect, Zimmerman told the dispatcher, fit a recent description
given out by law enforcement officers.

Three days later, he called to report two black teens in the
same area, for the same reason. "[Juveniles] are the subjs who
have been [burglarizing] in this area," he told the
dispatcher.

And last month, on Feb. 2, Zimmerman called to report a
suspicious black man in a leather jacket near one of the
development's units. The resident of that townhouse, Zimmerman
told dispatch, was a white male. Police stopped by to
investigate, but no one was there, and the residence was
secure.

After that, there's one final call logged in the report. At
7:11 on February 26, Zimmerman called police to report a black
male in a dark gray hoodie. A few minutes later, that
male—Trayvon Martin—lay dead on the sidewalk.

Tapes of the 9-1-1 call show that the dispatcher told
Zimmerman not to act on his suspicions, but before police
arrived, Martin was dead.

UPDATE, 5:24 p.m.:

A scan of the online court
records for Orange
County, Fla., where Zimmerman lives, shows that a man of the same
name and age was accused of violent behavior twice in 2005, once
for resisting arrest and battery of a law enforcement officer,
and once for domestic violence.